There is a concept that can be verified only by people who believe they have been kidnapped by aliens. It's called missing time, and it means just that. Instantly, it becomes a number of days later, and you have no idea how it happened. You lay down and take a nap; you wake up in the same place, but instead of the Tuesday you were experiencing, it's actually Saturday. Or later.
Really. I've read about it. Then they can tell, slowly as the situation reveals itself in their memories, about the experiences they had with some pretty weird beings who, I guess, needed them for their research. Meanwhile, some people experience being dismissed from the world for a few days, then being dropped right back into it.
I've recently spent the better part of three days back in the hospital. It was about as much fun as my other visits was, which is to say, not one bit. And, again, it was either that or the end. I went to the edge one more time and peeked over. A bunch of people prevented me from falling.
That Sunday dawned with me in obvious distress. But a church obligation got in the way. I knew I had to go. That saved my life.
I couldn't take 20 steps without having to sit down and gather myself. By that time, I knew things had gone south far more than being 'out of shape,' which I knew I was, too.
I knew it when the congregation stood for singing, which it normally does three times each service. The first of those times, I had to sit down. I've been going to Immanuel Presbyterian for about thirty years now, and that was the first time I couldn't last the whole song, couldn't stay standing.
I got scared. But I soldiered on. Or tried to.
After the service, I managed to help shepherd the flowers that someone had paid to display near the altar, which usually someone (I did not long ago, celebrating the ages of my parents by announcing their 76th wedding anniversary) pays to do and that then two deacons are assigned delivery of some of them to people that the co-pastor has picked out bereavement, celebration, or other causes. But again, I had to pause to catch my breath. Rich, my partner that day, couldn't help but notice. He pointed out, perhaps in empathy, that one of those selected for delivery lived in a home exactly one block from my apartment.
Even that seemed too far. "I don't even think I could do that," I said, and went to sit down in the hallway adjacent to the church nave. I would have to do that, too, in order to even get up, get my jacket on, and walk all the way back to the car, which seemed like quite a chore now, even though it's all of two blocks. I knew I'd have to lay down when I got back; beyond that, I had no idea.
But Rich, having seen me in obvious distress, had gone to consult with two people who would quickly change my day and, ultimately, save my life: his wife, Karen, who is a nurse practitioner; and the director of the deacons, Kathleen, who is a semi-retired, licensed physician.
They found me and sat flanking me on the bench. They asked me how I was feeling, and I told them. They looked askance at each other. "You'd better go to the hospital now," they said, practically in unison.
For roughly the last 35 years or so, I've made up my mind to first, go to the doctor instead of toughing things out; and second, do what they say. This was not an official visit, but when two say the symptoms sound pretty bad, they're probably not guessing.
The last time I had had a hospital stay, though, was one of those times I had gone in for one thing (colonoscopy) and someone had found something else (my heartbeat slowing beyond what they felt was comfortable). The result was--instead of outpatient treatment--six days of a stay, during which I'd had a pacemaker installed. Nothing seemed to be wrong with my heart, at least no pain felt nor shortness of breath while sitting, so I knew that wasn't the issue.
Whatever it was, I needed to know. But I wasn't going to be fooled this time. Instead of going right to the hospital, I made two stops; one at a gas station to make sure my tank was filled--a silly notion, that--and back home to pick up things for a prolonged stay. That was the better move. My hunch turned out right.
And not one minute too soon. I pulled into the parking lot of Ascension St. Mary's emergency room, got out my bag, and walked, or tried to walk, to the automatic door. I got halfway and once again, had to rest, leaning against the building. I'd gotten halfway there. Finally, I more or less stumbled into the front desk.
The staffers saw that I was in distress. I was admitted, given the universal ID wristband, and ducked into the closest room available.
My luck was holding. It was a little after noon on Sunday, and the emergency room was decidedly vacant of customers. I got immediate attention, which, looking back, I had desperately needed. About ten questions later, the staff knew I was in some kind of serious trouble. Of course, they gave me blood tests.
What they had found was something a hematologist told me about three weeks later. It would have freaked me out had I known. They did tell me that I had blood clots that had spread to my lungs; that was bad enough and of course would need immediate medical attention. What I didn't know until much later was how bad the situation was.
There is a scale, said the hematologist, that shows how well or badly your blood can clot. Some clotting is good, of course; if you cut yourself, that's how it heals. But too little means you can be challenged about that, and a scratch might mean a hospital run. Too much, and, well, the blood doesn't get where it's supposed to go, and that's an entirely different, equally serious, problem.
The average score on this scale, I was told, was 740. Wait for it: My score was nineteen thousand. I was, literally, off the charts. "I've never seen that before," said the hematologist. I'm guessing that the treatment staff hadn't, either. No one said the second part of that sentence: with someone who survived.
Suffice it to say: I was near death. My lungs were practically filled with clots. Should I have just gone home, said the hematologist, I would probably have just keeled over and that would be that.
By 4:30 or so, I'd been taken to the hospital's ICU and prepped for surgery. Hospitals don't do anything that fast unless they have to. The physician on call that afternoon was someone for whom I'd briefly been his heart patient, though he didn't remember me (a bit recycled, wouldn't you say). It made me feel better, though. After by-pass surgery a few years back, I'd had a moment when I thought something was terribly wrong and had reported to that very same hospital to be checked out. He was the responding surgeon, who had found nothing. In reporting that to me, though, he had gone out of his way to draw a sketch of a heart and its attentive arteries and veins.
That had been a comforting moment. I knew I was in good hands this day. He didn't remember. That was okay. I did.
In I went for what they called a 'vacuuming' process, in which the clots--well, most of them; the one in my leg from which the bunch in my lungs had apparently developed is still there--would be cleaned out. I was kept awake but feeling nothing. Good thing. After he was finished, the doctor showed me how thoroughly I'd been afflicted. My lungs looked as if they'd been coated with black magic marker. There was no room left. I had no idea how I could have taken another breath. Maybe they didn't, either.
Recovery would take at least overnight, I was told, and perhaps the day after that. I'd been right about taking my phone charger and a book with me.
After a couple of hours back in the ICU, I got a new assignment: They needed the room for someone (in worse shape?), so up to the regular hospital I would go. I tried to meekly protest, but to no avail. In came the wheel chair, out went Mark to Floor 4.
I met the nurse assigned to me. Unlike all the others, this one was dressed covering head to toe, and wore a brightly decorated babushka. The lines in her face indicated that she could not have been younger than 65. Her English was broken. She looked Southeastern European or Middle Eastern of some lineage; perhaps Muslim, hence the head cover. She reminded me of my Polish grandmother, who we affectionately used to call Bacia.
I don't recall her name, but meeting me caused her eyes to get quite a bit bigger. I quickly surmised the situation: I was her first patient, or perhaps, her first heart patient. Her first job would be to hook me up to my monitoring machine, or rehook, as it were. It meant she was supposed to know how to do it immediately, without help.
She didn't. She laid a piece of paper with what I could tell were lines with wires to connect to their proper ports. She was nervous; her hands were moving quickly as if to finish before I knew she was a neophyte. Didn't work.
Neither did the connections. Within 20 minutes, she was back on my falsely-wired chest, reconnecting me properly this time. She moved at least three wires to where they finally belonged. I watched the machine: bingo. Okay, if there was an emergency with me, it would be detected. I exhaled.
Within an hour, a new nurse reported to my bedside. Bacia was there, too, to let me know that she would be replaced. I exhaled again. I was confident that I'd live through the night.
But first I had to sleep. It got near one a.m., and they could see I was struggling. Someone, not the nurse on call, gave me a medication which she predicted would make me sweat. I awoke some three hours later, perspiration fairly running down the sides of my head. But I had slept, and I knew I would continue.
The next morning, I heard the best words a patient could hear: You're going home today. I thought I was supposed to wait for a doctor to see me, but a nurse practitioner got my papers ready (maybe they needed that bed, too) and plopped them in my lap. I must say I didn't feel "all together" when I left. It would take some day before that feeling returned.
That's probably because I'd gone through the second 'invasive' surgery in eight years. The last time that happened was in another moment in extremis: my triple by-pass. Your body reacts in an odd way. You've been invaded internally, and it kind of goes, "What just happened?" for a while. The last time, it took some months, more than six I'll wager, before that faded. This time, said my hematologist upon a follow-up appointment some three weeks later, it would take three months.
I'm in the middle of that now. I have good days and some not so good. But the former now outnumber the latter, so I know recovery is happening. The hematologist gave me two directives she wanted to stick: "Take your blood thinners (Like, I wouldn't? They stave off more clots.)," and "Don't push it." That last one was vague, but trial-and-error are taking care of it. As in the by-pass, I need to listen to my body carefully.
Home I came. Then I experienced "missing time." It was as if I'd gone somewhere for just a moment. I was back just half an hour when I remembered that the church deacons had a Zoom meeting. I was asked to report on my hospital stay. Strangely, perhaps looking back not so strangely, I felt myself breaking down as I said thanks. The shock of sudden death, once again turned back at the last minute, had arrived.
Ernie Pyle was a World War II journalist who reported mostly behind the front. He focused on not the generals or admirals, but the 'dog' soldiers who carried the real burden of fighting the battles day after day. Rick Atkinson, in his book The Guns at Last Light, about the final months of the European war after D-Day, quotes Pyle as writing that after the fierce campaign to free Cherbourg, an important French seaport, he felt like someone using up "your own small quota of chances for survival." I can't help but feel the same way.
I joke about using up "three of my nine lives"--count four, in the last eight years, if you include the continual possibility of a cache of bacteria, caused supposedly by routine surgery on my hip, overcoming amoxicillin, disengaging and hitting something more vital--but the reality stares me in the face every day. I wonder why my luck hasn't yet run out.
Pyle himself was prescient: jumping to the Pacific war after the German surrender, he was sniped by a Japanese soldier. His small quota had given out. Mine will, too. Now I know. I feel it. I now wake up with genuine gratitude. Every time now feels like the time my heart surgery was delayed, for some strange reason, a day. I went to sleep not knowing whether it would be my last.
It feels, too, like I ought to go do something I haven't yet done, something I keep thinking about doing. That is, when I can "push it" again. We'll see what the world looks like then.
Meanwhile, I won't stop going to church. Not that I would have, but the hematologist said something that I'd thought several times: Good that you went to church for more than one reason.
Be well. Be careful. With some (real) luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
